Agop (Hagop) Degirmencioglu, 64, an Armenian man who lived in and served as caretaker of a building owned by an Armenian foundation in Istanbul’s Beyoglu district, was stabbed to death there on August 7. His upstairs neighbor, Mehmet Serif Tayik, 45, has confessed to the killing and has been remanded in custody on a charge of intentional murder, according to the Istanbul-based Armenian weekly Agos and Turkish media reports.
Police went to Yaghane Sokak in the Sehit Muhtar neighborhood after a call reporting a bad smell in the building. They found Degirmencioglu’s body inside, with stab wounds to the back and side of his neck. The body was taken to the Forensic Medicine Institute morgue to establish the cause of death.
The man who placed that call was Tayik. He told officers he had walked in and found Degirmencioglu lying motionless. Police found contradictions in his account and detained him.
Questioned again, Tayik confessed. He said the two had a disagreement over rent and that he had been subjected to heavy insults, after which he stabbed Degirmencioglu. A court sent him to prison pending trial. Degirmencioglu did not own the building he was killed in. He was its caretaker, and the property belongs to an Armenian foundation, according to Sabah.
Tayik gave police another detail alongside his confession. He said both men were staying in the building without paying anything. A caretaker housed rent-free in the building he looks after is a common arrangement, and nothing in the police account or in the reporting so far explains what rent was in dispute, or who was owed it. Tayik’s version is the only account of the argument that exists, and the man who could contradict it is dead.
Celal Kilic, a longtime resident of Tarlabasi, said he had known Degirmencioglu for 30 to 35 years and described him as a man who harmed nobody. He said Degirmencioglu had taken the other man in out of pity, charged him nothing, and helped him financially. Kilic said Degirmencioglu had grown up in that building and would not leave it even as it fell into disrepair.
Kilic also questioned the sequence of events. He said Degirmencioglu was killed on the staircase and in the corridor rather than inside the apartment, which contradicts the police account of a body found in the flat. He said the suspect waited roughly 2 days before calling police about the smell, and that the man had cuts on his hands and traces of blood on him at the time.
Police and prosecutors have alleged no motive beyond the rent dispute, and the charge against Tayik is intentional murder.
Armenians in Istanbul have seen killings of community members before, and two cases still shape how they read news like this. Hrant Dink, the founder and editor of Agos, was shot dead outside his paper’s offices in January 2007 after years of nationalist threats and a prosecution for “insulting Turkishness.” Between December 2012 and January 2013, a series of attacks on elderly Armenian women in Samatya, including the killing of 85-year-old Maritsa Kucuk, spread fear through that neighborhood.
Armenian organizations in Turkey have long argued that the courts rarely test whether the killing of an Armenian carried an ethnic element. In the Samatya case, Murat Nazaryan, himself an Istanbul Armenian, was convicted of Kucuk’s murder and sentenced to life in February 2016, in a case community figures said had been closed without pursuing other evidence found at the scene.
A trial date for Tayik has not been announced.
